So, for nearly every day in January, I worked like the devil to get it all on paper: quoting songs I’d been listening to and jotting down snatches of dialogue I’d hoped to use for The Crowded Room, my high school story, quickly blossoming into a novella.

And university life was shaping up, too: party plans with fellow Mound graduate Geoff Morrison, and a new face in the crowd named Steph Pinsky. Taking the same liberal arts symposium with me, held Thursdays in the Architecture Building, Room 35, Steph—a “cute, black-haired, pretty-eyed freshman” who liked photography and writing, theater and dance—had turned my head. “I plan…